Have you ever wondered why your blog usually attracts a lot of traffic but doesn’t seem to attract the right audience? Or fails to drive traffic at all?
That could be because you do not know how to choose keywords for your blog.
The right keywords not only optimize your blog posts on search results but also ensure it attracts the right audience.
Now you know where you went wrong, you are probably wondering, how do you pick the right keywords for your blog?
This article contains insider tips that you will wish you knew before launching your first blog. Here is a step by step guide on how to find and choose proper keywords for your blog.
Understand the goal of your blog
You must take time setting and understanding your overall goals before selecting what keywords to use. Knowing how to choose keywords for your blog is only possible when you understand what are trying to achieve.
Once you are clear on your blog’s goals, to obtain results faster, you should choose lower competition, higher volume keywords. Moreover, the keywords you choose also depend on whether you are targeting a particular audience or a general audience.
If the goal of your post is to create awareness, the keywords you choose will be different from a blog post whose goal is to drive sales.
So, take a step back and brainstorm. Understand the goal of your blog post before deciding the keywords to use.
Develop a keyword list
To develop a keyword list, you need to put yourself in your customer or reader’s shoes. You should find the search terms that bring people to your site. Ask yourself, ‘If I wanted to find a particular product or piece of advice on Google, what would I type in the search box?’
To come up with a number of phrases, use Google Trends or Google suggest. You must have noticed that whenever you start typing on Google search box, there is an endless list of automatic predictions of what you might be looking for that pops up. This is Google Suggest. At the bottom of SERP (Search Engine Results Page), there is also another list of related searches that provide ideas for keywords to use.
Alternatively, or in conjunction, use tools such as Moz’s Keyword Explorer, Google Adwords, or KeywordTool.io to give you more long tail phrases related to your idea.
Particularly for authors, using Wikipedia, a related books’ table of contents, course lists, or book reviews are also great sources of insights for best keywords.
By now you should have come up with a long list of possible keywords that people might use to find your site. What to do next?
Narrow the list down to the most relevant keywords
You now need to be more specific. If you have it in your list that people use a term such as ‘Women boots’ to find your site, you need to use a less competitive keyword such as ‘Women’s ankle boots’. This will not only place your blog post higher on search engine results, but will attract the right audience who already know what they are looking for.
You can even go further and make it more precise by choosing something like ‘Women’s low-heel ankle boots’ for your keyword.
Preferably double-down or triple-down your keywords by overlapping phrases to ensure the blog post will be visible in more than one keyword search.
Also remember if you are just starting out and targeting less competitive, low volume keywords to make sure they are not no volume keywords! It’s a good idea to ensure the keywords you choose are not difficult to find by the using SEMrush Keyword Difficulty Tool. This tool will also show you how much effort you need to put in to beat your competitors.
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz, or Raven Tools can also help to measure search volume and competitors.
Write your keyword-targeted post
By now you should have a final list of keywords that you have chosen for your blog. Now you need to include them in your blog content. How do you do that appropriately?
Remember you don’t want to unnaturally place the keyword you have chosen for a particular post, it should read naturally. Also avoid keyword stuffing. It will not only make your content unappealing to customers and readers but will also hurt your ranking on search engines.
Make your content valuable by using keywords wisely throughout your content
Google knows what keywords to expect in what topic.
The keywords should naturally fit into your blog language. Don’t overuse the keywords in the text. Instead, mix them naturally with related search keywords to enable Google to understand what your content.
Here is how you make your keywords correlate with your topic:
- Use them in your title tag.
- When doing a video post, use the keywords in the text on the page.
- Include them in the meta tags of your image file, image Alt, and meta description.
- The keywords should be included in the anchor text of your internal linking
- Promote the post on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to encourage external linking.
How to Choose Keywords the Smart Way
Finding and choosing keywords is as simple as that. However, don’t put so much emphasis on finding the proper keywords that you forget the main goal of your blog; to educate, engage, and add value.
Publish regular content that relates to your customers’ persona. The right audience will find you.
And lastly, do not forget to track how your keywords are performing for you to know what aspect you can change or improve.
It’s your turn now! Start looking for keywords for your blog today.